A Victim Must Be Found (26 page)

“Niagara-on-the-Lake?” I heard Ella breathe in a gulp of air. “I thought so. What did the Brigadier have to tell you?”

“I’m not admitting anything, Benny. I’ve always protected my sources.”

“Okay, I won’t quiz you about him.”

“Well, your major was retired with the rank of lieutenant-colonel from the Royal North Surrey Regiment when he died in September 1985. My source also checked his scrapbook of obits from the
Times.
Col. Bell was living in Walmer, near Deal, England, when he died of a massive heart attack.”

“Damn it! Are you sure about that date?”

“Oh yes, I got everything down straight. September 12, 1985.”

“Well, thanks anyway. I was looking for another date.”

“Sorry.”

“Well, thanks, Ella. I owe you.”

“Yes, and if I ever asked you to pay up, where would I be?”

“Out of my debt, Ella. Thanks again.”

Anna was staring at me when I got clear of the phone. “I thought you worked scientifically, like Sherlock Holmes.”

“I work any way I can. Books are easier and neater than real life. I had a theory and it just blew up in my face. So now I have to get another one. I’m only human. I’m sorry to see the first theory go. There was a sort of neatness to it.”

The word “neatness” sparked a nerve, and I remembered the fifty-dollar tip Anna’s old man had sent me. It had been bothering my sense of the neatness of our professional relationship. I knew that the feeling would stay with me until I gave it back. I wasn’t suddenly against money and the free enterprise system, I was simply trying to keep complications to a minimum. With Anna looking on, I addressed an envelope to her father, slipped in the pretty pink bill, wrapped in a sheet of my office stationery and sealed it.

“What’s that all about?” Anna asked as I pasted on a stamp. It’s a smart girl who can read upside-down.

“Just unfinished business,” I said.

She was back to wearing jeans and a blue denim jacket. But the blouse underneath was silky and white. To me, it clashed with the motorcycle-look, but what do I know about fashions today? I haven’t learned a thing since Pa retired and closed the store downstairs. “Can I buy you a beer?” I asked her, and she looked like I asked to borrow her toothbrush. “It’s the drink of the people,” I said. “You might find it amusing.”

“Oh, shut up and get off my back,” she said. “Shall we?” She opened the door and I followed.

TWENTY-TWO

The Harding House is a Grantham institution. It should have a brass plaque outside telling the world that this is the pub where Ned Evans planned his productions of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and
Richard III
over several gallons of draught beer. If the owner is ever tempted to tear down this watering place in order to put up another glass-fronted six-storey box, the city fathers would come running. They’d chain themselves to those venerable doors and shout to the bulldozers outside, “You shall not pass!” At night I could sleep secure in the knowledge that the good conservatives of Grantham conserve the best of the past before running to the shoddy, the untried and the novel.

From my chair at one of those historic round tables, I could see the door that Bill Palmer would use coming into the pub. It was a minor distraction from my view of Jonah Abraham’s lovely daughter who shared my table. At first I thought she was wearing no make-up, but closer inspection showed that it was there, but there with a subtle hand. The waiter in a blue apron hovered near and dropped four draughts and made change from his apron before dancing away to deliver more glasses and bottles in the more sedate of the two beverage rooms. This, the “Ladies and Escorts,” was relatively quiet, the people well-behaved and temperate. On the “Gents” side of the partition fights sometimes broke out, the language was colourful and the consumption up to the limit of the busy plumbing. Anna made a brave show of downing her first draught in one gulp. Her cheeks turned a pretty pink and she tried to smile at me over the rim of her glass. “I think that gesture is restricted to fine wines,” I said.

“Now who’s the snob?” She put her glass down and then began making patterns with the wet rings on the red table top. “Have you found that list for Daddy yet, Benny?” she said, changing her tack before we got into that familiar wrangle again. I put a hand over hers.

“Look, Anna, we’re only going to fight if you keep trying to pump me for information. I’ll tell your father what I’ve learned as soon as I have things figured out. That might take a few more days, it may take a few more weeks. Some cases go on for months. This one won’t. You can tell him that at least. Did you tell him about the parking lot last night?”

“Of course.”

“And he said stay clear of me, right?”

“He … How did you know?”

“Maybe I’ve got the makings of a father myself. Maybe I was listening on the clothesline.”

“I can’t stay long, I’ve got to go home to change.”

“You’re going out?” As soon as I’d asked the question, I guessed the answer, but I let her give me her version.

“Yes, I’m going out. I do occasionally do my social duty, you know.” She looked like she wanted to tease me more but I put a spike in her cannon.

“Have you been back there since he died?”

“No. You think you know everything. Will you be there?”

“I wouldn’t miss it. I’ll even put on my good suit for the occasion.”

“Good. It’ll be nice to see you dressed up.” It was a disarming smile and I was responding to it when Bill Palmer came through the door on the “Gents” side looking for me “What’s the matter?” I didn’t know my face was so responsive.

“It’s just a man looking for me. He’s been digging up information I thought was gong to be useful half an hour ago. Now, it’s just information, but I have to see him anyway.”

Anna got up and tried to peer through to the men’s side. “Before I go, I should give you this.” She dug into a pocket and brought out an envelope with my name on it. “Daddy wanted me to give it to you.” She passed it over. “Another payday so soon,” she said. I ignored the remark. I was learning how to talk to Anna Abraham.

“I’ll look for you tonight,” I said. On her way out, Anna paused at the door, looking back into the “Gents” to see if she could see who it was I was going to talk to next. Palmer must have blended into the crowd. From Anna’s expression I could see that she was leaving the pub disappointed. Even in personal defeat, however, her passage across the room gave delight: patrons lifted their faces from a contemplation of their draught beer. A moment later and she had found the fresh air on James Street. I left a few coins on the round table top and made my way next door.

Palmer was in a narrow passage near the service centre. He was sitting closer to the smell of chips and the sound of beer being opened and poured, but away from the din in the main part of the room. There were already two amber glasses at his table.

“Well,” he said. He was using a trick I thought was my own: you raise your eyebrows, cluck your tongue, say “well” in a certain tone and the confession of guilt follows automatically. I found myself about to explain, then recognized the position and enjoyed the joke of having the tables turned on me by another pro.

“Were you able to dig up your files?” I asked.

“I found a few things. I haven’t been through this stuff in a few years. Not since …”

“Kiriakis was bugging you about Guenyeli.”

“Right. He was pretty obsessed with it. You know what he was like.”

“Did you ever actually meet Bell? I know you talked to him, but …”

“Meet him? Sure. I even went sailing with him a few times while I was trying to get information. He kept a dinghy in Kyrenia. That’s a little harbour on the north coast, a few miles from Nicosia. Tim was crazy about boats, claimed to be a typical Englishman in that.” Bill handed me a sheaf of paper in a faded green file folder. Inside were a dozen pages of onionskin paper. I only glanced at them. I thanked him but he made no sign of hurrying off back to the paper. “He went out to Palestine with the Royal North Surreys. He was regular army, Sandhurst and all that. They bumped him up to a higher rank before he retired. He never won any big decorations, just the regular ones most officers get when they’ve actually been in the field. It’s all in there.”

“What was he like?”

“Oh, Tim was a ‘matey’ soft; liked his pint in private and whisky and soda in public, liked the water, knew a hell of a lot about the island—archaeological stuff. He was the man to see if you were planning a trip. He knew the good roads and the churches to look at. Not that we were doing much sightseeing in those days. I didn’t see much of him after my pieces began to appear. Never much liked him.”

“He was living in Walmer, near Deal, when he died. Where’s that?”

“Close to Dover.”

“Ah, the white cliffs and all that?”

“I guess so. I once got a letter from him from there. He talked about how he and another retired major would walk out to the local of an evening. He said that they’d become characters: both of the same age, both ex-army, both with the same sort of regimental moustaches and both called Tim. ‘Tim and Sir Tim’ they called them as they wound their way home after an evening’s booze-up.”

“Sounds cozy. I suspect they were both unmarried or widowed, right?”

“One of each, I think. But I don’t know which was which. It was a sad letter. The only one he ever wrote me. He was upset because his pal had just died.”

“Heart attack after passing the port?”

“Nothing so traditional: hit and run on the road a halfmile from the pub.”

“Poor old fellow. Here’s to him. Here’s to both of them.” I lifted my glass of beer, then both of us set our glasses down without sipping. I guess we both remembered Guenyeli at the same moment.

It’s funny thinking of people and the things they do. I’ve sat in dozens of courtrooms trying to reconcile the face in the prisoner’s dock with the crimes that have been committed. I read a mystery once about a policeman who tried to sum up faces from history and decide whether they belonged on the bench or in the dock. It seems to me it’s even harder than that. We are all so full of worn-out ideas about villainy. When you look at pictures of Eichmann in his glass booth in Jerusalem, what do you see? All I see is the ordinariness of the face. The sort of face you see on the street every day. If Guenyeli was an evil act—and I haven’t heard the army’s side of the story: maybe it was an important strategic act that helped shorten the emergency, I don’t know—it was executed by Tim Bell, who spent his last years in quiet retirement. Nobody ever branded him a killer. No clubs were closed to him. He got his pint every evening with his old friend and an obit in the
Times
when his time came. If a neighbour tapped him on the shoulder in that pub and said, “Excuse me, aren’t you the chap who arranged the affair at Guenyeli?” would Bell have kept his mouth shut, changed tables, or quoted the man in the glass booth: “I was just following orders”?

Bill Palmer must have been thinking about Bell too. Neither of us said anything for a long time. When he began making motions to leave, I promised to take good care of his file and return it in a day or two. “Take your time,” he said. “All of the people concerned are dead now. It’s all water over the falls.”

It was his saying that they were dead that did it. It clicked into place and I understood. Bill must have thought I’d had my limit. In fact I nearly knocked over an empty glass with my elbow. “Bill, when did Sir Tim get hit by that car?”

“What? Why it was in July of 1985.”

“That’s great! That’s wonderful!”

“Well, I bet he didn’t think so!”

After Bill left to return to his word-processor at the
Beacon
, I opened the fat envelope Anna had given me from Jonah. There were two letters inside: the first was a brief note from Davies, Dickens, Fowler and Butler (signed per Michael Bodkin) stating that George Tallon was executor in the estate of his brother Arthur; the second was neatly typed under the letterhead of Consolidated Galvin. It read:

To the Director of Medical Records

Grantham General Hospital

Dear Miss Rilski,

I would like to authorize Benjamin Cooperman, a licensed private investigator of this city, to have access to all medical and health records relating to the death of my brother, Arthur Tallon, who died on 29 February of this year. As Arthur’s next of kin and as his executor, I am asking you to aid Mr. Cooperman in his research into this matter.

Yours sincerely,

George F. Tallon

Encl.

I vaguely remembered asking Abraham to get me access to Tallon’s medical file. Now, I didn’t know what to do with it. I put the letters back into the envelope and buried the evidence in my inside breast pocket, next to my heart, and hoped that something would occur to me.

I counted the change in my pocket. There wasn’t enough for what I had in mind, so I complimented the waiter on his service and exchanged a two-dollar bill for eight quarters. He made me pay for this courtesy by forcing me to listen to a diatribe levelled at his employer behind the bar. With no sign of burning ears, the bartender kept moving around in his cramped kingdom, filling glasses of amber draught beer and opening imported and domestic bottles. Not a movement was wasted as he danced along the invisible duck-boards.

Back out on James Street, the world looked bright and artificial after the pub. I collected the car and drove to Papertown to make two phone calls. The first could have been made from my office, but I was too excited about the idea behind it to wait until I was back in my own neighbourhood. I placed the call from a pay phone across the street from the Kesagami-Copeland Paper Mills through the overseas operator. She took the details of my credit card and passed me on. The English operator assisted me in getting the officer in charge at the police station in Deal, Kent. It didn’t take long. I talked to the desk sergeant for nearly ten minutes, as our voices bounced from dish to satellite and back again. Harry Armstrong’s local knowledge was nearly inexhaustible.

My second call was both cheaper and shorter. I dialled the number of the paper mill and asked to speak to Alex Favell. It seemed more than a month since I’d first talked to him and not three days. Let’s see, that was after I’d driven Mary MacCulloch to the golf club and allowed myself to drink while on duty. This time my approach was more cautious. Favell or somebody—it could be any of the people I’d run into since Monday—was cooking up trouble for me, just enough to interfere with the free and open way in which I’ve been able to operate in this town. He might be arranging for me to buy my second set of tires in two days. He might be having a word with a friendly alderman, or maybe the mayor himself. Savas warned me that he’d had complaints about me and my unprofessional manners and practices. Gilbert and Sullivan were right about policemen. Poor Savas is always getting it in the neck about me. All he had to do to put a permanent wrench in my spokes was to send a nasty note to the Registrar of Private Investigators, care of the Provincial Police. Pa would like that, of course. I could then find a real career, like helping my cousin Melvyn search titles and serve summonses and subpoenas. I think I’d rather set sail in a rowboat and hire on to assist Harry Armstrong in Kent.